This past weekend I visited the annual Kitchener-Waterloo Knitter’s Fair, which is usually a pretty good time and once again did not disappoint in the knitterly festivities. This time I was pretty good at browsing for new things and chatting with familiar faces (and new ones – you can’t help but bump into people in some of those corridors between vendor stalls), but remarkably sedate in my shopping. I emerged with just one skein of yarn. Mind you, it was a pretty great skein – 1000 yds of silk/merino laceweight from Fyberspates, purveyed by Feather Your Nest. It’s always nice to shop the stalls from the folks I wouldn’t normally visit otherwise, plus I found myself waiting for my sister or mother at some point and just staring at their shiny display, and in a matter of minutes it became not a matter of whether I would buy some but which colour I would buy. It’s great and I already know what I want to make with it.

And speaking of yarn and colour decisions at knitter’s fairs, I do sort of love how all of that unfolds. You can find yourself standing in front of a yarn display and picking up a skein and just holding it and suddenly be in conversation with the person next to you about how great the yarn is – and for all you know you have no chance of ever talking to that person again and have never seen them before in your life, but hey, let’s absolutely stop what we’re doing and have a chat about yarns and colours. Makes total sense.

The other nice part of the day was getting to see Stephanie’s talk on ‘This Is Your Brain On Knitting’ (highly recommendable), which in addition to being completely hilarious is extremely informative and validating about why knitters get so much out of knitting. I spent much of that lecture and the rest of the weekend knitting my then-current now-complete pair of ribbed socks, which was made even more satisfying by the knowledge that knitting as a repetitive visual-spatial pattern does, in fact, make our brains better and our selves more relaxed.

These are my latest Nice Ribbed Socks, in Socks That Rock Mediumweight, ‘Backstabber’ colourway. They really are that pink. So wonderfully, aggressively magenta-pink-and-purple that I sort of want to cast on five more things in this colour, but instead…

…I cast on another pair of ribbed socks in an entirely different colour. (More Socks That Rock, in Lightweight this time, ‘Tlingit’ colourway). There will come a day soon when I do talk to you about other projects besides ribbed socks, but today my friends, today is not that day. Ribbed socks are awesome, fall is coming, and it turns out repetitive visual-spatial motion (aka knitting ribbing) is super awesome for my brain and therefore I have prescribed myself more of it. Onwards with September knitting!

7 responses to “And all I got was this really nice skein of yarn”

Pretty pink socks too. I can’t wait until tomorrow’s post when you show us your finished Tlingit socks. Because from where I sit, you are super speedy knitter that can finish a pair in a day. Whereas I on the other hand, take a year (or more). ;-)

Your socks always come out looking so fantastic, whereas I have a lot of trouble with getting the sizing right… How do you adjust your sock pattern when you are switching between different weights of yarn?